Types of Stainless Steel

When people use the words “stainless steel,” they often use it as an “umbrella” term, however, there are many kinds of stainless steel with a multitude of uses.

Stainless steel is an alloy that is created by combining a variety of different base metals to produce a new alloy. Like with other alloys, the final product is significantly stronger than each of the source materials would be by themselves.

Creating Various Types of Stainless Steel

When creating stainless steel, many different materials can be used to obtain different outcomes. These include:

Carbon

Stainless steel with a high carbon composition is much more resilient and enduring than other alloys. This kind of stainless steel is favorable to produce cooking equipment and food-grade utensils.

Chromium

Stainless steel made of chromium is a lot more staining, corrosion, and tarnishing resistant. One well-known instance of this kind of stainless in use is the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

Nickel

Producing stainless steel with nickel increases the weldability, formability, and pliability of the material. This also improves its corrosion-resistant factors. Nickel is what enables stainless steel to be such an adaptable alloy.

The 3 Main Kinds of Stainless Steel

Whereas there are 1,000’s of various kinds of stainless steel alloy that can be created, a lot of alloys are going to fall into one of the below 3 categories.

Austenitic stainless steel

There are two primary characteristics of this type of stainless steel. Primarily, there is a lot of chromium included throughout the production of this kind of stainless steel. Items made with this kind of stainless steel are more resistant to corrosion. Secondly, these items are likely to be non-magnetic, even though they can become magnetic through a cold forming method. These are the most general kinds of stainless steel alloys.

Ferritic Stainless Steel

This kind of stainless steel is the second most general kind of alloy and is additionally magnetic. Items created with this alloy can be hardened by way of cold forming and additionally tends to be less costly than other kinds because of the lower nickel composition.

Martensitic Stainless Steel

Martensitic stainless steel is the most vaguely kind of stainless steel alloy. This kind of stainless steel is utilized in applications in which high tensile strength is required or a lot of impact resilience. In a lot of cases, this stainless steel is also combined with a preventive polymer coating to improve resistance to corrosion.